


i'm not standing still, i am lying in wait

by thermodynamicActivity (chlorinetrifluoride)



Series: The Collegestuck 'Verse [13]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Gen, Humanstuck
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-17
Updated: 2017-04-17
Packaged: 2018-10-19 21:51:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,663
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10648764
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chlorinetrifluoride/pseuds/thermodynamicActivity
Summary: You are Katya Levin, and you're graduating from college in two weeks. You should really be revising the last research paper of your academic career, but you'd much rather have a celebratory picnic with your friends, on Simon and Krishna's floor, since it's too rainy to go to the park. You'd rather do that and think about your past, present, and future.





	i'm not standing still, i am lying in wait

**Author's Note:**

> just in case someone reading this isn't familiar with the names i've given to the human ancestors  
> Katya Levin - The Disciple  
> Krishna Vandayar - The Signless  
> Simon Cao - The Psiioniic  
> Marisol Perez - Neophyte Redglare

_**May 2000 - Yekaterina Levin** _

When you were in 9th grade, you thought that by the time your college graduation rolled around, you’d be a different person, older and wiser.

And you’re older, sure, but underneath all the new academic things you’ve crammed into your head over the last eight years, you get the sneaking suspicion that you’re still that little fourteen year old girl with the conservative clothing and the hearing aids.

Well, not exactly. You’ve learned to enjoy breaking the rules instead of being faintly ashamed of your actions. Also, you’ve elevated keeping your idiot boyfriends out of trouble to an art form.

You don’t graduate for another two weeks yet, but you already have your robe, light blue and black, with the Columbia crown on the front.

Out of your group, you’re not the only person graduating this semester. Simon, who just finished the last final of his fifth year of college, is technically in your year now.

He says he wants to get out of here and go to grad school already, which is odd, because graduate school always struck you as being a case of “same shit, different institution”. 

Not even a different institution, for him. He’s going back to Columbia to attend the Teachers’ College. You’re going to NYU.

You tried to convince him to go with you, but he said that being on NYU’s loosely-defined campus might dredge up uncomfortable memories. You can respect that. You don’t want him to fall into a downward spiral, not after you, Krishna, and Mari spent so much time pulling him out of the last one.

He’s calm, now. He’s more than calm. He’s downright tranquil, moving his and Krishna’s beds flush against the walls so you can spread a blanket on their floor, without complaining.

All of you were going to have a picnic in Central Park to celebrate the impending end of finals, but then it started pouring rain an hour ago, with no signs of stopping. So here you are.

You have the sandwiches, the giant bottles of fruit punch, and enough corn chips and popcorn to kill a small army. No booze here, though. Simon’s on day 95 of continuous sobriety. Nobody’s going to chance even bringing a bottle of cooking wine into this suite.

“You’re clawfully happy,” you comment to him, while he pours himself a glass of soda.

He shrugs.

“I’m getting ready to graduate the fuck out of here, and once I do, I’m moving into my own apartment. Krishna’s probably coming with me, so he doesn’t have to pay for student housing.”

Oh, yes, you had forgotten about that.

He gives you a conspiratorial half-smile.

“And I didn’t tell Carolyn where I’m going, either. Once I’m outta here, I’m changing my number. She’ll never find me.”

You don’t bother to point out that he could choose to seek her out himself, that he might have shut the door on that particular relationship, but the lock might be on the flimsy side. If he thinks this is the last of it, then maybe it is. You hope it is. You hope he lets her go.

“You can come over whenever you want, Katya. You and Mari,” Simon offers. “But, like, not at three in the morning.”

You grin. “As if that didn’t go without saying.”

Krishna comes back from his usual flyering for the International Socialist Organization, looking dead on his feet. He’s been gone for at least five hours. He puts down his megaphone, takes off his slate gray sport coat, and drapes it over the chair at his desk. Then, he takes out a few sheets of looseleaf, removes the pencil from behind his ear, and starts writing something. The draft of a speech, probably.

This will not do. He must be exhausted.

You and Simon both yell at him to lie down in unison.

“I’ll lie down when I feel like it,” he grumbles. “There’s a demonstration on Saturday, you know?”

Simon rolls his eyes.

“Oh, a demonstration?” he asks. “Let me start borrowing my bail money in advance.”

Krishna crosses his arms over his chest.

“It’s not as if I asked you to come either way,” he says.

You put your glass of fruit punch down and tell them both to stop being dumbasses.

Yes, all three of you are going. Yes, Marisol is also probably going, because she’d follow you and Krishna anywhere, which is rather alarming.

“This might be the last time you’ll get to judge Krishna’s life choices up close and personal,” you point out to Simon. “Do mew really want to miss this oppurrtunity?”

“Can’t I just judge him from afar? I’ve gotten really good at that,” Simon replies.

“Nothing quite like getting close. Really close,” you say.

Simon gets the double entendre and groans. He has sworn off sex until grades come in, lest intimacy fuck up his mojo. (No, you don’t get his logic either.) You’re kind of surprised that he’s lasted two whole weeks, but he has.

Marisol shows up about half an hour later, cursing every professor she’s ever had for any subject at any point in time. She sits down on the floor, on the blanket, and continues to curse up a storm in Spanish. You took French in high school and college, so you have not a clue what she’s saying.

She stops cursing for long enough to flip through one of her Poli Sci notebooks, and find her exam timetable.

“Three down, two to go,” she says. She glances over at you. “What about the rest of you guys?”

“I’m done,” Simon informs her.

“One more test in two days,” Krishna says.

“One paper left for me, for modern American poetry,” you say. “I have to hand it in tomorrow.”

Mari takes off her glasses and puts them down on the blanket next to her. Then she decides that they might get broken there, and leaves them on Simon’s desk, between a booze bottle that’s been empty since January, and a vase full of dead flowers.

He gave them to Krishna a while ago. Then they had an argument, Simon took his flowers back, and watched them slowly wilt and dessicate. He hasn’t thrown them out yet. He'll have to do it on move-out day.

“What’s your paper on?” Marisol asks.

“Protest poetry,” you reply. “Muriel Rukeyser, centered around this poem she wrote, _To be a Jew in the Twentieth Century._ I was going to write about _The Book of the Dead,_ but that was entirely too long. I’m quoting it in my paper, though.”

All Marisol knows about poetry is whatever she’s learned from you by living with you for two years. So the only response she has is a confused, “I see.”

Krishna hugs you from behind, planting a kiss between your shoulderblades.

“Analyzing _The Book of the Dead_ would have made for one hell of an ambitious paper,” he says.

Yeah, that’s what you thought, too. Then you realized that you were about to graduate with high honors at the end of Spring, and you didn’t need to waste sleepless nights in the library just to impress professors who were already highly impressed with you.

For the first time in your history of undergraduate study, you took the easier path.

You don’t know how you’re going to manage to apply yourself the way you'll have to in graduate school, because you feel somewhat burnt out. Four intensive years of study has a way of doing that. Sure, you’re joyful around your friends, but you’re also tired. Maybe you’ll stay in your room at home for part of the summer and try to recharge.

Maybe it won’t actually be an issue. Simon has been burnt out since 1996 and he still managed to get through college. Marisol’s not burnt out, but she is tired, approaching the verge of it. 

And Krishna’s also going to burn himself out if he isn’t careful. He’s so passionate about his causes; he throws himself into them entirely, the toll it takes on him be damned.

(“How’s it feel to know that your boyfriend likes protesting more than spending time with you?” Simon asks.

You pour yourself a cup of coffee and shrug.

“I don’t know. Mew tell me.”

You don’t begrudge Krishna this in the least, his ideals and his determination to see them through. You never have. If he were less fervent, you may not have started seeing him in the first place. But there was something about that guy with the megaphone that caught your eye.

As your graduation date draws nearer, he becomes more introspective about his plans and motivations. You and he sit outside his and Simon’s dorm building, in the scraggly grass, even as the night deepens.

“I’m definitely going to the Teachers’ College when I finish undergrad next year,” he declares. “Assuming I get in, of course.”

“Mew will. Any idea what grade level mew want to teach?” you ask him.

“High school.” He lights up a cigarette he’s stolen from Simon and blows the smoke away from your face. “Old enough that they know about injustice, and how it can operate, but young enough that they may not have such a vested interest in perpetuating it.”

“Makes sense,” you figure aloud.

He takes your hand in his free one.

“What I want to prove, what I want to do, it extends far beyond myself,” he goes on. “I have dreams of a world like this one, but devoid of oppression. A world where everyone is truly free.”

He stares up at the sky, at the paltry stars you can see at night in New York City, as if one of them, somewhere, might contain the place he searches for.

When you first met him, you thought he was another one of those pushy activists, trying to force pamphlets and politics on you. And sure, he could be that person, and drive you and Simon up the wall in the process, but not frequently.

He revels in dialogue, not monologue. He genuinely wants to know what other people have to say about his points, even if their conversations end in continued disagreement. He’s protested so hard and so often that even the cops have mostly given up on knocking the shit out of him. That’s an achievement, you think.

He’s a visionary, eyes blazing with a future few of you are ever likely to ever see. You’re not as cynical as Simon, but you don’t have an pretenses about the years to come. Change tends to be gradual. Very gradual. An infinitesimal crawl toward an unknown destination.

You put your head in his lap, so you can gaze up at him and play with the buttons on his jacket. He idly winds a hand into your hair.

“I’m going to miss you when you graduate,” he says.

You smile. “I’ll be right downtown. It’s not like I’m leaving the country, or even the city.”

It’ll be different, though, he says. You can’t argue there. 

But, even so, he’ll have Simon. Someone to drag him out of himself and to yell at him to stop trying to glean knowledge from dead philosophers and go the fuck to sleep.

“When you miss me,” you begin. “If you miss me…”

“I will most certainly miss you!” Krishna insists.

“Yeah, well, if you can’t get ahold of me, just ask Mari to walk you into the Freedom Tunnel. Most of my art’s still there.”

All your graffiti, tagging the walls of that empty subway tunnel. Maybe they’ll even get Simon to come along, so he can bitch about how going is “a shit ass idea”.)

“Katya!” Simon yells, jolting you out of your reverie. “You planning to finish your paper on my computer or are you just gonna stare out into space all afternoon?”

Yes, right, you had been meaning to do that. You sit down at Simon’s desk, load the floppy disk into his computer, open Word, and get down to your last minute corrections.

Meanwhile, he, Marisol, and Krishna sit around on the blanket on the floor. Simon pops a movie into the VCR, and turns on the TV. The picture is grainy and full of static at first, so Krishna jiggles the antenna around for a while to rectify this. Yes, Simon’s TV is that old.

Simon rolls his eyes.

“Fucking hell, you’re not gonna make the picture on a video clearer by screwing around with the antenna.”

Krishna throws his hands up. "You fix it, then."

"I don't know if I can. I think the tape might be shot."

As soon as you hear the first minute of the movie, you have a wistful smile for the computer screen you’re facing. You hum a few of the bars to “Deliver Us”, off-key as you always are.

You remember watching this movie when it came out, and then you got so homesick that you went home without changing first. Your parents stared at you like you had grown a second head.

Short black dress, olive green blazer, no stockings, and wearing makeup.

_Yeah, they were no longer Orthodox technically, but show some shame, Cat._

Your brother was the first to break the silence by sprinting over to embrace you, as if you’d never left for college, as if you didn't look strange.

 _“I missed you, Katenka,”_ he murmured against your shoulder in Russian, his voice partially muffled by the fabric of your jacket.

_“I missed you, too.”_

You went by your house more recently to give graduation tickets to your parents and siblings. They were marginally less shocked by your appearance by then. And you’re happy they’ll be there to see you finish college.

A question occurs to you then, one you’re hesitant to ask.

“So Simon,” you say.

“Yeah?”

“Are _your_ parents going to commencement?”

You think you know the answer to that. Simon left home at sixteen and kept minimal contact with them. At first, it was because Carolyn had turned him against them. Then, it was because he was too ashamed of himself to ever go home.

He communicates with them through his little sister, when he bothers to do that much.

He stares at you like you’ve fucked up his good vibes by bringing them up. You apologize. He shovels a handful of popcorn into his mouth and shrugs like it’s no big deal.

“I gave three tickets to my sister yesterday,” he says, and he doesn’t sound as if he’s bullshitting you. You have a sixth sense for that. “One for her, and two for my parents. Guess that means I have like two weeks to live.”

“Surely your reunion won’t go that badly,” you tell him.

“I don’t know how it’s going to go,” he says. “I haven’t seen them in seven years. I think they’ll be disappointed in me.”

Simon’s parents always struck you as being perfectly nice people. Worried about their son constantly, but nice just the same. You think it would take a lot for them to stay disappointed in him like that.

“You won’t know until it happens. Try to have some optimism,” Krishna chimes in.

“If your parents are mean, I’ll yell at them,” Marisol says. 

She pours some popcorn into a bowl, and then brandishes her cane at the air.

“Since when are you going to commencement?” Simon wants to know. “You’re not graduating for a while yet.”

“One of my friends gave me her extra ticket,” she replies. “I’ll be there. And I’ll be watching.”

“You’ll be _watching_ ,” Simon repeats, trying not to laugh.

In response to that jibe, Marisol jabs Simon in the side with one of her bony elbows. Simon curses at her.

You and Krishna exchange glances. If they start fighting, you two are doing a round of rock-paper-scissors over who has to break them up. 

These morons are morons, but they're _your_ morons, you decide, for the millionth time.


End file.
